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More on HD's Stalled Status
The Wall Street Journal reports on HD Radio's continued free fall: You should read the entire article, which summarizes only a portion of the problems with the HD Radio roll-out over the last four years, but this paragraph has the salient points:
"Still, some industry veterans say HD Radio's rollout was bungled and fear that the window of opportunity is rapidly closing as other audio entertainment options, like Apple Inc.'s iPod music players, become entrenched. 'If they don't get [HD Radio] going right now, they're going to lose it,' says Bill Figenshu, a Skytop, Pa., consultant to radio and other media companies."
That's basically it. Four years into the serious rollout, there are still only a handful of desktop radios on the market with very little to distinguish them from other, cheaper radios. There's is still practically zero integration with home receivers, which makes HD Radio a non-startup for people upgrading their home-entertainment systems.
The article doesn't mention all the trouble, not resolved, with night-time HD Radio broadcasts on AM frequencies. Nor the long delays in getting next-generation chipsets for mobile devices.
Basically, iBiquity's technology and rollout is still stalled at about 3 years , despite an increasing (but minute) number of units shipped: 600,000 for 2008, which is far below any estimates ever given by the company in years past.
What's the problem? Too little, too late. The early chips clearly didn't meet the needs of the audio industry, or were too expensive. Radio station conversions slowed way down. We're still somewhere in the 10 to 15 percent range, and very little of the secondary and subsequent digital FM channels offer anything interesting beyond conventional broadcast.
Podcasts, Internet radio, and the XM/Sirius merger...how much longer can HD Radio hang on in this investment climate where consumers aren't going to buying new radios, anyway?
I have been accused in the past of being a HD Radio shill because I found so much promise in the technology. If you read back through this blog, it's pretty apparent how disillusioned I became when promised timelines fell apart, new features never arose, and the pace of adoption never picked up.
There were a lot of advantages HD Radio had over other forms of broadcast technology, but those have mostly evaporated in a 3G world. On my iPhone, I can get nearly any station I want, even over the slow EDGE connections (about 100 to 200 Kbps) in my first-generation model. Tell me why I need HD Radio when I have Internet radio on my phone, coupled with its podcast features?